Has any art form caught on so swiftly or so universally as cinema? Although the exact moment of its origin is still debated upon, most accounts agree on the year 1895. The year in which brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere (the gentlemen in the above picture) projected La sortie des usines Lumiere to the members of the Societe d’Encouragement pour l’industrie nationale and then gave private demonstrations of their films to the Photographic Congress at Lyons. Within no time, at the Hotel Scribe in Paris, they mounted their first ever public screening of their films.
Within a mere 20 years of these pioneering ventures, films were being watched by mass audiences across the world. Production was under way in all the major European countries, in the United States, Canada, India, China, Japan, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Australia, and was already supported by a substantial industry in many of those countries. So instantaneous was the appeal of moving pictures that Charlie Chaplin stepped before a movie camera for the first time in January 1914 as a young English vaudeville artist, and by the end of that year had become the most widely recognized person in the world.
Paradoxically, one major factor in cinema’s rapid rise to universality was its principal limitation: Silence. Silent films were easily and cheaply adaptable: slot in a few inter titles and a film could play to any audience. On the other hand the Japanese, as distinctive as ever, employed official readers known as benshi, whose job was to stand and beside the screen and recount the plot to the audience. One can speculate that cinema had been born in full ‘talkie’ mode it might have have taken far longer to achieve worldwide acceptance. As it was, by the time the ‘talkies’ came in, the habit of going to the cinema was too firmly established to be discouraged by language barriers.
The prime cinematic genres emerged early, too. Within months of the Lumiere brothers’ screenings, the ex-stage magician Georges Melies was creating fantasy, horror, and science fiction movies. Documentary, of course, existed from the start, as many early filmmakers simply pointed their cameras at the world around them. Comedy swiftly followed, along with costume based drama, romance, thrillers, psychological drama, war movies, ancient epics and even pornography. As usual the United States made westerns as it was their favorable choice, especially after the industry moved to California. Animation soon arrived, its first appearance credited to J. Stuart Blackton with Humorous Phases of funny Faces. By 1910, virtually every genre that we now recognize had been established, although some were in primitive form.
The same can be said for of the main cinematic techniques. It took remarkably little time for filmmakers to discover the manifold tricks that the camera could play. From Close-ups to fades all made their debuts in those initial decades. All that has happened since has been in terms of vastly greater sophistication and technical agility. Youngest and most dynamic of the major arts, cinema has gone from being primitive to post modern in barely a century, still bearing imprints of it origins.
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